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Two-button Mobile Interface: Touchscreen Based Text-Entry for Visually-Impaired Users

Authors:
Hanseul Cho
Jae-joon Kim

Keywords: visually-impaired, touchscreen, text0entry, input, Braille

Abstract:
As the usage of mobile devices grows explosively, texting on a touchscreen becomes everyday routines for communication. For visually-impaired people, however, text-entry on the touchscreen is largely cumbersome and time-consuming due to the difficulty of locating keyboard buttons without any physical signifiers. We present new text-entry methods based on the Braille system to address this issue. The proposed Left Touch and Double Touch schemes are based on the two-button interface for Braille input, so that visually-impaired users can type textual characters without moving their fingers to find target buttons. We conducted experiments to evaluate the usability of the proposed methods and compared them with the One Finger Method and VoiceOver. The results show that the speed of the Double Touch is 3.94 second per letter (SPL) while that of the Left Touch is 2.60 SPL. The Left Touch was twice as slow as the VoiceOver but 39% faster than the One Finger Method. Although the typing speeds of the proposed schemes were slower than the VoiceOver, we found that the subjects felt the proposed schemes more comfortable to use than the VoiceOver. The convenience of using only two buttons in the mobile interface also enabled visually-impaired users to be less dependent on auditory feedback while typing texts.

Pages: 134 to 142

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: March 19, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-61208-538-8

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from March 19, 2017 to March 23, 2017